2012. Twain’s Brand: Humor and Contemporary American Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
2004. The Midwest (edited with Joseph W. Slade). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. One of eight volumes in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures; awarded “Best Reference Book 2004” by Library Journal.
2000. Defining New Yorker Humor. Studies in Popular Culture Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
1991. Garrison Keillor: A Voice of America. Studies in Popular Culture Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
1990. Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature (edited with Joseph W. Slade). Ames: Iowa State University Press.
Selected other writing
exploiting capacities of
Orbis, Ibidem, and Archiva
- 2012. “From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: Comic Traditions in the American Novel.” In The Blackwell Companion to the American Novel, edited by Alfred Bendixen, 218-240. Oxford, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
- 2011. “The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2009.” Studies in American Humor 3rd ser. 23 (2011): 81-111.
- 2009. “The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2007.” Studies in American Humor 3rd ser. 19 (2009): 105-138.
- 2008. “The International Twain and American Nationalist Humor: Vernacular Humor as a Post-Colonial Rhetoric.” Mark Twain Annual, no. 6 (2008): 33-49. [Ranked 1st among Wiley downloads from the Mark Twain Annual 2010-11 and 2009-10.]
- 2007. “Communities of Comedy and Commerce: More than Funny Business.” In Communities and Connections: Writings in North American Studies, ed. Ari Helo. Helsinki, Finland: Renvall Institute and University of Helsinki Press, 2007. 167-180.
- 2005. “From the Field: The Future of American Periodicals and American Periodicals Research.” American Periodicals, 15.2 (2005): 196-201.
- 1996. “Charting the Codes of Cyberspace: A Rhetoric of Electronic Mail.” In Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, edited by Lance Strate, Ronald Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson, 275-296. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1996.
- 1994. “Five Ways of Looking at ‘Aprille’: Storytelling Analysis in the Twenty-First Century.” In Eye on the Future: Popular Culture Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century in Honor of Ray Browne, edited by Marilyn F. Motz, John G. Nachbar, Michael T. Marsden, and Ronald J. Ambrosetti, 91-106. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1994.
- 1987. “Anatomy of A Fascinating Failure” [Mark Twain and the Paige Typesetter]. American Heritage of Invention and Technology 3 (Summer 1987): 55-60.
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Nota Bene stands at the center of my life as a scholar. Twain's Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture, just released in November, 2012, is my fifth Nota Bene book. I became a Nota Bene user with version 1.0 late in 1985, while finishing my dissertation. I had read about it in an MLA newsletter after recovering from a serious illness that (along with several other impediments) had seriously delayed my work, and thought that computerizing might help me finish at last, but had no idea how to move in that direction. In fact, I bought my first computer to meet the system requirements for NB, and I did finish in the next few months. In the process, I found a whole new love of writing, because I had always found myself tinkering with sentences until they said what I meant, and in the days before word-processing that process meant page after page of unreadable scrawls that I spent far too much time recopying and retyping, staying in place instead of moving my text forward. Nota Bene freed me to revise while I wrote and still see what I was thinking, and thus changed writing from a grind to a joy.
Almost from the start I found the textbase, now Orbis, immensely useful for organizing and retrieving archival information; it's so easy to put notes from each library folder or item into a separate file whose name indicates the bibliographic details, then search for remembered (or forgotten) keywords and concepts. Soon after finishing my dissertation I used the textbase to collate details on the history of automated printing in the nineteenth century with the financial and technical records of the Paige Compositor, the typesetting machine credited (erroneously, I found) with bankrupting, Mark Twain. Other textbases followed. For Garrison Keillor: A Voice of America (1991), for example, I indexed my transcriptions of radio skits, mock-advertisement, and monologues from A Prairie Home Companion from the archives of Minnesota Public Radio. I often get ideas for interpretations of the evidence while taking notes from archival sources, and Orbis lets me retrieve those too, according to codes I devised for marking them.
Certainly I could not have written Defining New Yorker Humor (2000), my history of the early magazine, without Orbis to manage the huge volume of notes on editorial correspondence and reading that I collated with a customized Ibidem database I created of 15,000 cartoons, covers, illustrations, articles, poems, and stories (and my thoughts on them) from in the years before the magazine had either table of contents or an electronic edition.
Twain's Brand relied more on Archiva and Ibidem than Orbis--I loved being able to attach web pages, PDFs, and reading notes to Ibidem bibliographic records--and I have since switched from PC to Mac, but being able to import and export files in other formats has meant that, even when collaborating on editorial projects, I have never been the least bit tempted to switch from Nota Bene to anything else.
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